Yelp’s Dataset Challenge

Crowd-source review company Yelp has released a dataset of companies from 10 cities across four countries for its “Dataset Challenge.” The dataset contains 1.6 million reviews and 500,000 tips by 366,000 users for 61,000 businesses, as well as data such as business hours of operation, parking availability, and number of check-ins by users. The Yelp Dataset Challenge offers cash prizes to students and researchers who create meaningful projects with the data or have their research published in an academic journal (previous challenge data was used in several hundred peer-reviewed papers). Yelp is offering the data to help identify how things like culture, season, and location impact a business’s success, as well as advance things like natural language processing for understanding reviews.